BOOKS @ VOLUME #289 (29.7.22)
Read our latest NEWSLETTER and find out what we've been reading and recommending.
>>Read Thomas's review.
>>On translating the novel.
>>Flora digitalica (working on the commission).
>>Some sample pages are here (scroll down until you find them).
>>Looking through a series of mirrors,
>>Get your copy now.
>>Marble.
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith (translated by Jennifer Russell) {Reviewed by THOMAS} Perhaps, he thought in a rare moment of self-reflection, or in a moment of rare self-reflection, he wasn’t sure which, I have become so accustomed to writing my so-called fictional reviews, to writing my so-called reviews in a fictional manner or even, more confusingly, in an autofictional manner so that they are not immediately recognised as the fictions they are, that I have proverbialised myself into a corner and am incapable of writing a straight review, if there is even such a thing, or a review just written as a review, there might be such a thing as that, he thought, without the novelistic trappings of my approach, my distancing and deflection tricks, my wriggling away from the task at hand and from the possibility that I am not up to the task at hand, he thought, perhaps all my trickeration, so to call it, is just a way of concealing my incapability, from myself at least for surely no-one else is fooled, he thought. None of this helped, he thought, this self-reflection, so to call it, makes me more incapable rather than less, makes anything that might pass for a review, or even for a meta-review, less possible, I have thought myself to a standstill, he thought, unless of course I create a fictional reviewer to write the reviews for me, a fictional reviewer who could write a straight review, a review written as a review, that elusive goal that for me is now unreachable, at least without some trickeration, I have got to the point at which only a fake reviewer can write a real review. Anyway, anyone but me. I wonder how my fictional reviewer will approach this book, Thread Ripper, he thought. Thread Ripper is written in two parallel sequences or threads on the facing pages of each opening, and each of those threads has its own approach to the matters that inform them both. My reviewer would probably find themselves obliged to begin or find it convenient to begin with a description of how the verso pages carry an account, if that is the right word, of the author’s researches and considerations of the history of weaving and computer programming, which turn out to be the same thing, at least in the author’s concurrent artistic practice, so to call it, here also described, and which turn out to be the same thing also as neurology and linguistics, or at least to have typological parallels to neurology and linguistics, if these even warrant separate terms, which the fictional reviewer may speculate on at some length, or not, these recto pages deal with matters outside the author’s head, matters of what could be termed fact, even though the term fact could be applied in this instance to some quite interesting philosophical speculations, speculations about things that may actually be the case, which, for the fictional reviewer, is as good a definition of the term as any. The recto pages are concerned with problems of knowing, the fictional reviewer may begin, or may conclude, whereas the verso pages are concerned with problems of feeling, so to call it, not that in either case should we assume the so-called problems to be necessarily problematic, although in many cases in both strands they are, the recto pages are concerned with what is going on inside the author’s head, with matters subject to temporal mutabilities, temporal mutabilities being an example, or being examples, of the sort of words a fictional reviewer might use when writing a review as a review but not making a very good job of it, though it is unclear whose fault that might be, does he have a responsibility for the performance of this fictional reviewer he has devised to do his job, he supposed he did have some such responsibility but he couldn’t help starting to wonder if successfully creating a character who fails to write well might be more of a success than a failure, though it would be, he supposed, a failure at his stated aim of achieving by the employment of a fictional reviewer the sort of straight review that he found himself these days incapable of writing, he wanted the fictional reviewer to write a real review, after all, a fictional review, which would not need to be actually written and which in this instance he could easily refer to as being wholly positive about this interesting book Thread Ripper, which he has read and enjoyed and which started in his mind, if it warrants to be so called, some quite interesting speculations and chains of thought of his own, and which he could suppose, to make his task easier, his fictional reviewer has also read and enjoyed, they are not so different after all, he thought, such a fictional review would not realise his intention or fulfil the purpose of the reviewer, he had intended the fictional reviewer to review the book in a straightforward way, even though he, even if this intention was by some chance realised, looked as if he would in any case treat the whole exercise, to his shame, as so often, as something of a sentence gymnasium. He would like to write in a straightforward way, he thought, to say, in this instance, I like this book and what is more I think you should buy it because I think you would like it too, but he could not help making the whole exercise into a sentence gymnasium, I never can resist a sentence gymnasium, he thought, these days less than ever, show me a sentence gymnasium or some relatively straightforward task that I could treat as a sentence gymnasium, pretty much anything can be so treated, he realised, and I am lost, he thought, whatever I attempt I fail, I am lost in the fractals of my sentence gymnasiums, or sentence gymnasia, rather, he corrected himself, my plight is worse than I thought, he thought. In Thread Ripper the author on the verso dreams, the fictional reviewer might point out, he thought, or he hoped the fictional reviewer would point out or remember to point out even if they didn’t get so far as to actually point out, according to the verso pages the author dreams and longs, and the author on the recto pages, if we are not at fault for calling either personage the author, programmes her computer with an algorithm to weave tapestries but also with an algorithm to write poetry, the results of which are included on these recto pages, if the author of those pages is to be believed, he didn’t see why not and he thought it unlikely that his fictional reviewer would have any reservations in regard to the authenticity of these poems, so to call them, or rather to the artificial authorship of the poems and of the so-called ‘artificial’ intelligence behind them, any productive system, any arrangement of parts that can produce something beyond those parts, is a sort of intelligence, he thought, though he evidently hadn’t thought this very hard. All thought is done by something very like a machine, even if this is not very like what we commonly term machines, he reasoned, reducing the meaning of his statement almost to nothing while doing so, it is a good thing I am not writing this review myself, it is a good thing I have a fictional reviewer to write the review, a fictional reviewer whom I can make ridiculous without making myself ridiculous, he thought, unconvincingly he had to admit though he didn’t admit this of course to anyone but himself, the universe is full of mess, a mess we are in a constant struggle to reduce. “The digital has become a source not of order, as we had hoped, but of mess, an accumulation of images and signs that just keeps on growing,” writes the author of Thread Ripper. “For humans it’s a mess; a machine can see right through.” Perhaps there is a difference between machine intelligence, which compounds, and human intelligence, which reduces, he thought briefly and then abandoned this thought, perhaps my fictional reviewer will have this thought and perhaps my fictional reviewer will be able to think it through and make something of it, fictional characters often think better than the authors who invent them, fictional characters are themselves a kind of machine for thinking with, artificial characters with artificial thoughts, if there can be such things, perhaps intelligence is the only thing that can never be artificial, he thought, though we might have to change the meanings of several words to make this statement make sense. “I hear on the radio that the human brain at birth is a soup of connections, that language helps us reduce them,” writes the author in Thread Ripper. “The more we learn, the fewer the connections.” Does grammar, then, work as a kind of algorithm, he wondered, or he wondered if his fictional reviewer might be induced to wonder, is it grammar that forms our thoughts by reducing them to the extent that we may affect on occasion to make some sense, whether of not we are right, which is, really, unimportant, the grammar is what matters not the content, is this what Ada Lovelace, who died before she could describe it, referred to as the calculus of the nervous system, could he actually end his sentence with a question mark, he wondered, the question mark that belonged to this Ada Lovelace question, or was he too tangled in his sentence to find its end? |
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullan {Reviewed by STELLA} Be careful what you wish for. In The Last Good Man, Thomas McMullan delves into the slippery world of morality and judgement. We meet Duncan Peck on the road from a devastated and chaotic city. He’s travelling across land, it’s dark and bleak and a wrong step will mean a suffocating drowning in the bog. 'Watch your step' could be the catch cry for this dystopian debut. A dark mass rises from the bog nearby only to be quickly surrounded by a plastic-rain-coated group. A rescue team? Unlikely, with their metal pipes and mob mentality. Yet they draw the miserable man from the bog and head back to a village. Duncan Peck stays mum. There’s a familiar voice — the man he is looking for. Finding him is about to change his life. This last good man. If there was ever such a thing. Duncan arrives in the village and catches up with his brother-in-arms, James Hale. There are recriminations, but also joy at being in each other’s company again. Their past both binds and hangs over them. Each is edgy about looking back, especially Hale who has found his place in this community. A small community of structure, rules (seemingly ‘fair’) and justice as dispensed by all — a true community reckoning as needs demand. How did they get to this order from a world of ecological and economic chaos? The Wall. There it is — visible on the horizon from a great distance, looming over the community in size and psychology. Anyone can write on the wall. If a wrong has been done it will be announced. A mention or two may not warrant any punishment, aside from a wooden piece of furniture attached to a back for a few days. Various men and women go about their daily chores with a lamp, chair or table tied to their backs. Hale tells Duncan Peck early in the piece he better sort out his ropes — make sure he has a good one to ease the troublesomeness of such an imposition. Yet, get your name on the wall in repetition and for more troubling matters, then life might not be so easy, or even possible at all. Accusations have to be acted on — it’s natural justice. Gossip and petty jealousies raise their ugly heads. This is the twitter-sphere writ large in analogue. Technology is a thing of the distant past and, while life is simple, it’s definitely not without complexities and intricate dancing if you want to keep your name from the wall and the attention of the mob that will hunt you down when you make a run for it. You can know many secrets and truths but you would be foolish to voice those in this judgemental village. Thomas McMullan brings us a dark unsettling time, with echoes of Riddley Walker (without the language breakdown) and early Ian McEwan, where human behaviour is both attractive and frightening. Everybody wants to be loved. Everybody wants to be good, but somehow no one can quite pull it off without being bogged down in a sticky mire. Desire and survival are bedfellows Duncan Peck can not ignore if he wants to keep his head. |
NEW RELEASES
Pain was Joe Grim's self-expression, his livelihood and reason for being. In 1908-09 the Italian-American boxer toured Australia, losing fights but amazing crowds with his showmanship and extraordinary physical resilience. On the east coast Grim played a supporting role in the Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns Fight of the Century; on the west coast he was committed to an insane asylum. In between he played with the concept and reality of pain in a shocking manner not witnessed before or since. Winkler braids the story of Grim in Australia and meditations on pain with thoughts on masculinity and vulnerability, plus questionable jokes, into a highly creative haymaker.
Short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award.
"The strangest book you are likely to read this year." —J.M. Coetzee
"Grimmish meets a need I didn't even know I had. I lurched between bursts of wild laughter, shudders of horror, and gasps of awe at Winkler's verbal command: the freshness and muscle of his verbs, the unstoppable flow of his images, the bizarre wit of the language of pugilism-and all the while, a moving subterranean glint of strange masculine tenderness." —Helen Garner
Campaigners, chefs and food writers rail against 'intensive farming'. But the problem isn't the adjective. It's the noun. Around the world, farming has been wiping out vast habitats, depleting freshwater, polluting oceans, and accelerating global heating, while leaving millions undernourished and unfed. Increasingly, there are signs that the system itself is beginning to flicker. But there is another way. Regenesis is an journey into a new possible future for food, people and the planet. Drawing on the rapidly advancing science of soil ecology, Monbiot shows how the hidden biological universe beneath our feet could transform what we eat and how we grow it. He travels to meet the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable growers who cultivate pests as well as potatoes; through producers of perennial grains who are liberating their fields from ploughs; to the scientists pioneering new forms of protein. The tiniest life forms in the soil might help us save the living world, allowing us to produce abundant, cheap, healthy food while returning vast swathes of land to the wild. Interesting and hopeful.
"When my squawking baby brother arrived, I realised I needed a new family. No one seemed to mind when I packed my bag. I took a box and used my best handwriting to write 'FREE KID', then waited for some new parents to take me home." Waiting in a box like an abandoned pet and encountering the passersby changes the child's perspective. At the end of the day, when her parents pretend they need an older sister for their new baby, she is ready to leave her box and go happily back home. A delightful book!
This remarkable book challenges our received narratives of historical determinism and the myths of cultural ‘progress’ devised to justify the status quo. If we unshackle ourselves from these preconceptions and look more closely at the evidence, we find a wide array of ways in which humans have lived with each other, and with the natural world. Many of these could provide templates for new forms of social organisation, and lead us to rethink farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilisation itself. A fascinating and important book, now in paperback.
>>All figured out.
>>Human history gets a rewrite.
>>Collective self-creation.
>>Inequality is not the price of civilisation.
>>American anarchist.
>>What other social systems have there been?
>>Lots of really good videos.
>>Articles by Graeber.
>>Graeber's playlist.
>>Also available as a very satisfying hardback.
>>Other books by David Graeber
We regularly use Julia Busuttil Nishimura's previous two cookbooks at home because they are full of sure-fire recipes that are a pleasure to make and even more of a pleasure to eat, so we are looking forward to adding this new book to our collection. Julia Busuttil Nishimura always knows the right dish for the occasion, weather or time of day. She also understands the power food has to bring people together, whether that's to prepare a meal or enjoy the delicious results. With recipes ranging from quick, flavourful meals for busy weeknights to simple indulgences for summer feasts, Around the Table perfectly matches dishes to time and place. It includes Mediterranean classics from Italy and Malta, and Japanese dishes Julia has learned from her husband, Nori, that will soon become favourites around your table, too.
A fast-paced fantasy adventure set in a broken, future England, following the further exploits of the outlaws Scarlett and Browne. Scarlett McCain and Albert Browne have outwitted their pursuers and escaped into the wilderness once more, and it’s not long before they become famous for their audacious heists across the Seven Kingdoms. Yet neither is fully able to escape the shackles of the past – as they discover when a dangerous job turns sour. Soon old enemies and sinister new threats are pressing in on every side, and Scarlett and Browne must pull off an impossible mission and strike out against The Faith Houses and the Brothers of the Hand if they are to save the people they hold most dear.
>>Read Stella's review of The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne (#1).
>>Book trailer for Book #2.
>>Read Stella's review of The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne (#1).
>>Book trailer for Book #2.
>>A reader recommends.
Wonderworks: Literary invention and the science of stories by Angus Fletcher $28
Wonderworks reveals that literature is among the mightiest technologies that humans have ever invented, precision-honed to give us what our brains most want and need. Wonderworks tells the story of the greatest literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day America. It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience to demonstrate that the inventions really work: they enrich our lives with joy, hope, courage and energy, and they help our brains heal from grief, loneliness and even trauma.
A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century Copenhagen pulse currents of desire, violence and despair, as women and men dream of escaping their conventional roles and finding freedom and happiness — without ever truly understanding what that might mean.
"An intense reading experience. So clear is Ditlevsen's eye that it's impossible to tear yourself away from the fates of her characters, however grim." —John Self, Guardian
Language opens up our world, and in the same instant, limits it. What does it mean to exist in a language that was never meant for you to speak? Why are we missing certain words? How can we talk about our communal problems without fuelling them? What does it actually mean to speak freely? As a writer and activist fighting for equality, Kübra Gümüşay has been thinking about these questions for many years. In this book she explores how language shapes our thinking and determines our politics. She shows how people become invisible as individuals when they are always seen as part of a group, and the way those in the minority often have to expend energy cleaning up the messy thinking of others. But she also points to how we might shape conversations to allow for greater ambiguity and individuality, how arguments might happen in a space of learning and vulnerability without sacrificing principles — how we might all be able to speak freely.
Julia has landed a fresh start — at a 'pan-European' restaurant. 'Imagine that,' says her mother. 'I'm imagining.' Nick is flirting with sobriety and nobody else. Did you know: adults his age are now more likely to live with their parents than a romantic partner? Life should have started to take shape by now — but instead we're trying on new versions of ourselves, swiping left and right, and searching for a convincing answer to that question: 'What do you do?' Reward System is a set of ultra-contemporary and electrifyingly fresh fictions, of a generation of the cusp, meshed in Zooms and lockdowns, loneliness and love.
"Reward System is an exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Reading these stories, I found myself thinking newly and differently about contemporary life." —Sally Rooney
Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter—along with a perspective informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek. One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly nontraditional, and grounded in Black and queer feminist lineages. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, misogyny, and other forms of oppression. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe.
Finding the Raga: An improvisation on Indian music by Amit Chaudhuri $25
By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri's singular account of his discovery of, and enduring passion for, North Indian music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practices will alter the reader's notion of what music might — and can — be. Tracing the music's development, Finding the Raga dwells on its most distinctive and mysterious characteristics: its extraordinary approach to time, language and silence; its embrace of confoundment, and its ethos of evocation over representation.
"Supple, intricate and uncompromising, full of delicate observation and insight, Amit Chaudhuri's Finding the Raga immerses us in the rigorous beauty and cosmology of Indian classical music. It is also a loving memoir about relationships and places, dedication and vocation." —Geoff Dyer
Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine and Poland by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms – ethnic riots – dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, Veidlinger shows how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems.
In the closing third of the twentieth century, Wales experienced the simultaneous effects of deindustrialisation, the subsequent loss of employment and community cohesion, and the struggle for its language and identity. These changes were largely forced upon the country, whose own voice, rarely agreed upon within its borders, had to fight to be heard outside of Wales. Brittle with Relics is a history of the people of Wales undergoing some of the country's most seismic and traumatic events: the disasters of Aberfan and Tryweryn; the rise of the Welsh language movement; the Miners' Strike and its aftermath; and the narrow vote in favour of partial devolution. Featuring the voices of Neil Kinnock, Rowan Williams, Leanne Wood, Gruff Rhys, Michael Sheen, Nicky Wire, Sian James, Welsh language activists, members of former mining communities and many more, this is a vital history of a nation determined to survive, while maintaining the hope that Wales will one day thrive on its own terms.
"Richly humane, viscerally political, generously multi-voiced, Brittle with Relics is oral history at its revelatory best: containing multitudes and powerfully evoking that most remote but also resonant of times, the day before yesterday." —David Kynaston
"A testament to the brutal circumstances that bonded the communities of Wales into a new polity for the 21st century." —Gruff Rhys
Who's Hiding? by Satoru Onishi $20
Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking by Marianne Eloise $33
Homesickness by Colin Barrett $35
Board book editions in either te reo Maori or English of this deservedly popular and enjoyable book for infants. 18 colourful animals stand in a row. Something small changes on every double page: animals disappear, turn around, cry or sleep. Young children love spotting the changes and, at the same time, get to know animal names, colours, expressions, emotions and how to count.
"Obsessive was, still is, my natural state, and I never wondered why. I didn't mind, didn't know that other people could feel at peace. I always felt like a raw nerve, but then, I thought that everyone did." Writer and journalist Marianne Eloise was born obsessive. What that means changes day to day, depending on what her brain latches on to: fixations with certain topics, intrusive violent thoughts, looping phrases. Some obsessions have lasted a lifetime, while others will be intense but only last a week or two. Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking is a culmination of a life spent obsessing, offering a glimpse into Marianne's brain, but also an insight into the lives of others like her. From death to Medusa, to Disneyland to fire, to LA to her dog, the essays explore the intersection of neurodivergence, obsession and disorder, telling the story of one life underpinned and ultimately made whole by obsession.
"The mortifying ordeal of being known, minus the ordeal and sans mortification. I felt recognised on every page, learned so many new things, and laughed so hard I choked on my water. Read this!!!" —Naoise Dolan
The much-anticipated second collection of stories from the author of Young Skins. In these eight stories, Barrett takes us back to the barren backwaters of Ireland's County Mayo, via Toronto, and illuminates the lives of outcasts, misfits and malcontents with an eye for the abrupt and absurd. A quiet night in the neighbourhood pub is shattered by the arrival of a sword wielding fugitive. A funeral party teeters on the edge of this world and the next, as ghosts won't simply lay in wake. A shooting sees an everyday call-out lead a policewoman to confront the banality of her own existence.
The Rack by A.E. Ellis $24
Why Patti Smith Matters by Caryn Rose $28
"The stories in Homesickness are crafted with skill and flair. Colin Barrett anchors the work with emotional accuracy and careful delineation of character, and then, using metaphors and beautifully made sentences, he lets his narrative soar." —Colm Toibin
"Superb. There is an utterness to his attention, a devotion to the lives of his characters, that shifts the work into some more lasting place. Barrett is already one of the leading writers of the Irish short story, which is to braggingly say, one of the leading writers of the short story anywhere. He means every word and regrets every word. He just kills it." —Guardian
'Consider yourself an experiment of the gods in what a man can endure.' Paul Davenant, has arrived at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps with hopes of a full cure and a normal life. But as the weeks and months pass interminably by, he undergoes endless tests and medical procedures, each more horrific and dehumanizing than the last, all the while facing the possibility that his case may be hopeless. Despite the pain, indignity, and tediousness, Davenant never loses sight of the outrageous, farcical side to his situation, the absurdity of it all. And when he falls in love with a fellow patient, he becomes determined to recover his health. Will he succeed, or will all the tortures he has endured have been for nothing? When The Rack was first published in 1958, the critical acclaim was universal — reviewers compared it with the works of Proust, Mann, and Camus and declared it a masterwork destined to take its place among the great novels of the 20th century. It was subsequently all but forgotten until this new edition.
"There are certain books we call great for want of a better term, that rise like monuments above the cemeteries of literature — Clarissa, Great Expectations, Ulysses. The Rack to my mind is one of this company." —Graham Greene
Through her poetry, her songs, her unapologetic vocal power, and her very presence as a woman fronting a rock band, Patti Smith kicked open a door that countless others walked through. Sha has done much that embodies the 'nothing-to-hide' rawness of punk, and has long nurtured a place in society for misfits of every stripe. Why Patti Smith Matters is the first book about the iconic artist written by a woman. The veteran music journalist Caryn Rose contextualises Smith's creative work, her influence, and her wide-ranging and still-evolving impact on rock and roll, visual art, and the written word. Rose goes deep into Smith's oeuvre, from her first album, Horses, to acclaimed memoirs operating at a surprising remove from her music.
>>1976.
A novelisation of the life of Uriah Rennie, the UK football Premier League's first and only Black referee. From Jamaica to Sheffield to the recently formed Premier League, Uri rises through the ranks as a referee, making it to the the highest level of our national game. But along the way he is confronted with tensions and prejudices, old and new, which emerge as his every move is watched, analysed and commented on.
Bolla by Pajtim Statovci $33
No Words by Maryam Master $19
Wooolf! by Stephanie Blake $19
"Freestyle poetry is teamed with kick-by-kick reports in this stirring, stylistically unorthodox novel. A bold and powerful narrative experiment." —Guardian
It is April, 1995. Kosovo is a country on the cusp of a dreadful war. Arsim is twenty-two, newly married, cautious - an Albanian trying to keep his head down and finish his studies in an atmosphere of creeping threat. Until he encounters Milos, a Serb, and begins a life in secret. Bolla is the story of what happens when passion and history collide - when a relationship, already forbidden and laced with danger, is ripped apart by war and migration, separated by nations and fate. What happens when you are forced to live a life that is not yours, so far from your desires? Can the human remain?
Hero doesn't feel like a hero, but sometimes she feels as if the universe is asking her to be one. When Aria, a mysterious boy who never EVER speaks, starts at school and is picked on by His Royal Thug-ness Doofus (Rufus), Hero and her bestie Jaz feel compelled to help. But they're far too chicken to actually do anything heroic, so they befriend Aria and try to uncover the truth about him. What happened to his voice? Where did he come from? What are those three dents on his middle finger? This is the story of a 12-year-old refugee who's trying to establish a new life in a new country, grapple with his past and, most importantly, find his voice.
Once there was a little rabbit who did only what he wanted. When his mother asked him to tidy his room he cried, “Wooolf! The wolf is coming!" and, when she ran away, he did whatever he wanted. One day he did a wee where he wanted, and the wolf came to get him. "Wooolf!" he cried, but his mother didn't fall for that. The wolf got him! It was just Simon's father in a wolf mask. Simon promised never to cry wolf again. But when his mother opened the cupboard in the morning, a wolf cried, "Awwoooo!"
>>Read Stella's review.
>>Look inside the book.
>>On making the illustrations.
>>An interview with Lundberg.
>>"An artist begins their journey to maturity when they have to deal with loss."
>>Berta Hansson.
>>The book in published in English by Book Island.
>>Your copy.
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | The Bird Within Me by Sara Lundberg {Reviewed by STELLA} If you are a lover of illustration and wonderful children’s books, this should be in your collection. The Bird Within Me, from the excellent children’s book publisher Book Island, is a beautiful story — tender and thoughtful. Based on the life of Swedish artist Berta Hansson, it recalls her childhood growing up in a rural village, her love of nature, and her dream to be an artist. Berta feels different from her sisters, from others in the village (apart from her uncle, who she sees as a magician — others call him 'the theatrical farmer') and dreams of escape. “Well, if I was a bird, I could fly off. Away from our village. To something else. To a place where I could be myself. Where no one calls for me all the time or thinks I am ridiculous.” As we get to know Berta, Sara Lundberg's illustrations take us between reality and dream. Sometimes we are confronted with the rigours of school and family portrayed in detailed drawings or collaged paintings, while on the next spread we may be taken away into Berta’s world of trees, birds shaped out of blue clay, and internal perspectives beautifully expressed in a quiet and evocative style. 1920s farming life was hard, and harder still for Berta and her siblings with their mother suffering from tuberculosis. This disease lies under the fragile heart of Berta’s childhood. It causes suffering, fear and grief, and is a constant interloper in the family’s life. For Berta, her relationship with her mother is tender and sad — yet it is her mother’s appreciation of the small sculptures by her side and the drawings that hug her walls that keep this young girl’s talent alive. There are pivotal moments that change Berta’s fate of working on the farm and becoming a housewife: the doctor who recognises her talent; her uncle and his own paintings in the room that to Berta smells safe; and the pot of food deliberately left to burn — a small defiance, one which makes her father recognise the need to allow Berta to spread her wings. Or. at least, continue her education. Sara Lundberg has drawn on the paintings, letters and diaries of the artist to articulate this loving portrait of a twelve-year-old on the cusp of life and the passion for art that will shape her life. A tender and exquisitely illustrated book about following your dreams. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, with illustrations by Catrin Morgan {Reviewed by THOMAS} This book is a sort of fictional encyclopedia of pretty much everything you don't understand about the world but were unable quite to pinpoint and about which you are unable even to find the right sort of words to express your confusion. Familiar things and their meanings have been separated and allowed to settle in new patterns of association, clotted together by the adhesive properties of language, giving rise to new science, new culture, new emotions. Marcus is set against the deadening effect of familiarity; really, his Age of Wire and String is no more savage, tender and surprising than the world we take for granted every day: the problems he describes are the very same ones that already throng the skin dividing our internal world from our external (a concept demonstrably arbitrary and invertible) but to which we have become numbed and unobservant. This book will certainly not help you to understand anything any better, but it will make your confusion immaculate and add to it dimensions of awe and beauty that you had hitherto not suspected. This edition pairs Marcus's text with Morgan's equally >>obtuse and intriguing illustrations. |
NEW RELEASES
In Maylis Besserie's novel, Samuel Beckett at the end of his life in 1989, living in Le Tiers-Temps retirement home. It is as if Beckett has come to live in one of his own stage productions, peopled with strange, unhinged individuals, waiting for the end of days. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is filled with voices. From diary notes to clinical reports to daily menus, cool medical voices provide a counterpoint to Beckett himself, who reflects on his increasingly fragile existence. He remains playful, rueful, and aware of the dramatic irony that has brought him to live in the room next door to Winnie, surrounded by grotesques like Hamm or Lucky, abandoned by his wife Suzanne who died before him.
"To set out to portray a master stylist, the author of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, would daunt the most experienced writer. That this is Besserie’s debut is remarkable; that she carries it off so convincingly, with such elan and poetic force, is a wonder. Besserie does not mimic the style of Beckett’s threnodies, yet she evokes, subtly and with great skill, a fitting intensity, bleak lyricism and black humour." —John Banville, Guardian
"If the small detail can reveal the large life, and the tiny reveal the epic, then Maylis Besserie has uncovered the gem of an expansive life. This beautifully translated book is an evocation of Beckett’s last days, told from a variety of angles, all of which add up to a portrait of great humanity. Beckett goes on, even in spite of it all, with humour and grace and his own form of deep belief." —Colum McCann
"If the small detail can reveal the large life, and the tiny reveal the epic, then Maylis Besserie has uncovered the gem of an expansive life. This beautifully translated book is an evocation of Beckett’s last days, told from a variety of angles, all of which add up to a portrait of great humanity. Beckett goes on, even in spite of it all, with humour and grace and his own form of deep belief." —Colum McCann
An audacious act of the imagination." —Books Ireland
Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a collective multitude of voices, After Sappho reimagines the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as they battle for liberation, justice and control over their own lives.
"This book is splendid: impish, irate, deep, courageous, moving, funny…and truly significant, I think." —Lucy Ellmann
"It’s brilliant, an unobtrusive, quietly mesmerising, imagined collocation of linked feminist lives that succeeds in delineating a movement bigger than all of them without diminishing any one of them." —Ian Patterson
"After Sappho is superb. Mesmerising. Such incredible writing. And thinking. Selby Wynn Schwartz tips everyone out of the water." —Deborah Levy
"A bold and original novel." —Guardian
Awarded a three-month stipend to travel and work, a Swedish writer flies to Madrid, where in a bar she meets a man with an extraordinary story to tell. In exchange for somewhere to sleep and to hide out for a few days, he is willing to tell her the whole astonishing tale. What follows is an account of fantastic proportions and ingredients: the existence of a shadowy Internet TV show with a certain morality clause, a threat to the storyteller's life, a diabolical nun, and the story of a girl with a missing left thumb. The tale is also the precursor to a meeting between the writer and the infernal miracle worker, Lucia—a meeting that ultimately forces the writer to make a fateful decision about her own inner essence.
"Lina Wolff is a literary monster, she has a hundred eyes and senses things that the rest of us can't see. That's how she has been able to write this story that retells the twisted, horrible, funny, sometimes beautiful mysteries contained in the apparent sack of meat that we are." —Yuri Herrera
>>The body as dispute.
>>Rash decisions.
>>"Can you describe this itching?"
>>Writing is a beast that chases you.
>>Rash decisions.
>>"Can you describe this itching?"
>>Writing is a beast that chases you.
Next year, Pom will be starting school. But a year's too long to wait when you're excited. Today, Pom has decided to visit some friends by dropping in on different animal schools. At Little Leapers, the rabbits are learning how to read, write and count. At Bulrushes, the frogs are creating beautiful artwork. At F is for Foxtrot, the foxes are playing different sports. What if Pom's dream school was a little bit of all that? One thing's for sure : school is an amazing adventure! Marianne Dubuc, the creator of this book, has hidden lots of details in the illustrations. In every school Pom visits, you can find: an animal having a nap, an animal dropping something, an animal eating a snack, an animal who is reading, an animal visiting from another school. Completely delightful!
The eagerly awaited new novel from the author of Celestial Bodies (winner of the 2019 International Booker Prize). Zuhur, an Omani student at a British university, is caught between the past and the present. As she attempts to form friendships and assimilate in Britain, she can’t help but ruminate on the relationships that have been central to her life. Most prominent is her strong emotional bond with Bint Amir, a woman she always thought of as her grandmother, who passed away just after Zuhur left the Arabian Peninsula. As the historical narrative of Bint Amir’s challenged circumstances unfurls in captivating fragments, so too does Zuhur’s isolated and unfulfilled present, one narrative segueing into another as time slips, and dreams mingle with memories.
"A rich and powerful novel that showcases the interplay between memory and emigration and the precariousness of sisterhood in a world that encourages the domination of men, told in a sumptuous and incisive translation by Marilyn Booth." —Jennifer Croft
"A rich and powerful novel that showcases the interplay between memory and emigration and the precariousness of sisterhood in a world that encourages the domination of men, told in a sumptuous and incisive translation by Marilyn Booth." —Jennifer Croft
Artist Tom de Freston has long had an obsession with Gericault's painting 'The Raft of the Medusa', and the troubling story behind its creation. The monumental canvas, which hangs in the Louvre, depicts a 19th century tragedy in which 150 people were drowned at sea on a raft lost in a stormy sea, when the ship Medusa was wrecked on shallow ground. When de Freston began making an artwork with Ali, a Syrian writer blinded by a bombing, The Raft's depiction of pain and suffering resonated powerfully with him, as did Gericault's awful life story. It spoke not only to Ali's story but to Tom's family history of trauma and anguish, offering him a passage out of the dark waters in which he found himself.
"Gericault's Raft stands as a statement as much as painting, a history lesson, a nightmare, a gigantic perfidy, a visual shorthand for abuse and disaster rendered in exquisite oils. In pulses of literary reference and art history and Gericault's own radical life story, de Freston evokes a provocative new voyage for the rotting raft — seen through his own visceral experience of the vast painting, and its uproarious terrors and visions, which hold a mortal but undying resonance for our own times. A stupendous work." —Philip Hoare
"To read Wreck is to observe a mind as it delves into the pentimenti of the past, moving through complexities of horror, art, solidarity, and trauma. Unforgettable." —Doireann Ni Ghriofa
>>'The Raft of the Medusa'.
>>'The Raft of the Medusa'.
This classic memoir by one of Aotearoa's most prominent Maori writers is now updated with new material. "This is a book of memories. Some of them are my own. Some of them belong to others. They are as true and as fallible as any memories—distorted by time and distance and a writer's choice of words." In the memoir that kickstarted a writing career that has spawned more than 20 books, including many award-winners, Ben Brown writes of a quintessentially New Zealand way of living that may not change the world or even ripple its waters, but is replete with meaning. Gathered from the tobacco-green valleys of the Motueka River where he grew up during the 1960s and 1970s, Brown's memoir is rich with a sense of place, and of family. The strands of his parents' lives reach from Outback Australia and the hardship years of the Great Depression and World War II, to the Waikato heart of the Kingitanga and a re-emergent people, to a time and place where tobacco was 'king' and a small farm by a river was the sum of all ambition.
The Absolute by Daniel Geubel (translated by Jessica Sequeira) $40
The Absolute is a sprawling historical novel about the Deliuskin-Scriabin family, made up of six generations of geniuses and madmen. Beginning in the mid-18th century in Russia, across Europe and ending in late 20th-century Argentina, the characters' lives play out in different branches of art, politics and science in such radical ways that they transform the world and its reality. The narrator's ancestor, Frantisek Deliuskin, invents a new form of music in the 18th century; his son, Andrei Deliuskin, makes some marginal annotations to the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola that are later interpreted by Lenin as an instruction manual to carry out the Russian Revolution of 1917; Esau Deliuskin, following the course of his father, creates a socialist utopian society; and down through the generations to the narrator, whose creation takes him back in time and space to the moment of the Big Bang.
Slave Empire: How slavery built modern Britain by Padraic X. Scanlan $30
"The Absolute is an extraordinary novel, an exploration of memory and music, of social history, science and family ties. Guebel's remote ancestor is Richard Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy; his contemporaries, Norman Manea and W.G. Sebald." —Alberto Manguel
The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery. Slave Empire puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, Padraic Scanlon shows how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.
"Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose." —The Economist
A menagerie of poems about the gnarlier aspects of being a creature of this world. Within these pages wilderness and suburbia collide. The 'I' in these poems takes many forms: a wolf, a waterbuck, a bird 'stuck circling the carnage'. Whether soaring above or prowling through the neighbourhood, Morton's beasts bear witness to an unremitting vision of pain and ecological damage. As the flames climb higher, the beasts in this collection are left to wander and live out their lives. There is love and loneliness, passivity and rage. Yet there is always hope. Hoof and hide, fang and gut, these images and insights are those of an artist in a war zone intent on chronicling beauty in a world that's falling apart. Morton's poems take a bite out of the world around us, as they explore reality through the vitality and immersiveness of their imaginative powers.
Heather Cass White's Books Promiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preeminence of literature as an aesthetic form, Books Promiscuously Read illustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading provides for those inclined to do it.
"An elegantly constructed meditation on the vital relation between reading and the everyday self, Books Promiscuously Read animates the experience with wit, brilliance, and affection. A pleasure to read and pass on." —Vivian Gornick
In this brief guide to leading a more rational life, acclaimed physicist Jim Al-Khalili invites readers to engage with the world as scientists have been trained to do. The scientific method has served humankind well in its quest to see things as they really are, and underpinning the scientific method are core principles that can help us all navigate modern life more confidently. Discussing the nature of truth and uncertainty, the role of doubt, the pros and cons of simplification, the value of guarding against bias, the importance of evidence-based thinking, and more, Al-Khalili shows how the powerful ideas at the heart of the scientific method are deeply relevant to the complicated times we live in and the difficult choices we make.
Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification. Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe, steeped in Romanticism and mythology, and to Germany's baroque cities. With an outsider's objectivity he has crafted an intimate portrait of the country to its present day.
Words Fail Us: In defence of disfluency by Jonty Claypole $28
"He writes in a voice that blends the acuity of Martha Gellhorn with the meditative grace of W.G. Sebald." —Economist
In an age of polished TED talks and overconfident political oratory, success seems to depend upon charismatic public speaking. But what if hyper-fluency is not only unachievable but undesirable? Jonty Claypole spent fifteen years of his life in and out of extreme speech therapy. From sessions with child psychologists to lengthy stuttering boot camps and exposure therapies, he tried everything until finally being told the words he'd always feared: 'We can't cure your stutter.' Those words started him on a journey towards not only making peace with his stammer but learning to use it to his advantage. Here, Claypole argues that our obsession with fluency could be hindering, rather than helping, our creativity, authenticity and persuasiveness. Exploring other speech conditions, such as aphasia and Tourette's, and telling the stories of the 'creatively disfluent' — from Lewis Carroll to Kendrick Lamar — Claypole explains why it's time for us to stop making sense, get tongue tied and embrace the life-changing power of inarticulacy.
"Jonty Claypole's book is timely, thoughtful, rich in fact and personal anecdote, and looks to a more enlightened, speech-diverse future.'" —David Mitchell
"Comprehensive, open-minded, thoughtful and wise. A liberating book." —Colm Toibin
A queer, Māori-inspired debut fantasy about a police officer who is murdered, brought back to life with a mysterious new power, and tasked with protecting her city from an insidious evil threatening to destroy it. The port city of Hainak is alive: its buildings, its fashion, even its weapons. But, after a devastating war and a sweeping biotech revolution, all its inhabitants want is peace, no one more so than Yat Jyn-Hok a reformed-thief-turned-cop who patrols the streets at night. Yat has recently been demoted on the force due to "lifestyle choices" after being caught at a gay club. She's barely holding it together, haunted by memories of a lover who vanished and voices that float in and out of her head like radio signals. When she stumbles across a dead body on her patrol, two fellow officers gruesomely murder her and dump her into the harbor. Unfortunately for them, she wakes up. Resurrected by an ancient power, she finds herself with the new ability to manipulate life force. Quickly falling in with the pirate crew who has found her, she must race against time to stop a plague from being unleashed by the evil that has taken root in Hainak.
How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel $35
How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck? And other perplexing puzzles by William Poundstone $25
Nina Simone's Gum by Warren Ellis $45
"A wonderful queer noir fever dream." —Tamsyn Muir
"Fiercely queer. A strange and wondrous re-imagining of noir that takes its cues from biopunk and SE Asian mythos to create something wholly different. There's real imagination at work here—I loved it." —Rebecca Roanhorse
Fishing with his father and his Uncle Prosek — the two finest fishermen in the world — Ota Pavel as a child took a peaceful pleasure from the rivers and ponds of his Czechoslovakia. But when the Nazis invaded, his father and two older brothers were sent to concentration camps and Pavel had to steal their confiscated fish back from under the noses of the SS to feed his family. With tales of his father's battle to provide for his family both in wealthy freedom and in terrifying persecution, this is one boy's passionate and affecting tale of life, love and fishing.
Today is Tuesday. What day of the week will it be 10 years from now on this date? How would you empty a plane full of Skittles? How many times would you have to scoop the ocean with a bucket to cause sea levels to drop one foot? You have a broken calculator. The only number key that works is the 0. All the operator keys work. How can you get the number 24? How many dogs have the exact same number of hairs? This book reveals more than 70 outrageously perplexing riddles and puzzles and supplies both answers and general strategy for creative problem-solving.
In 1999, Nina Simone gave a rare performance as part of Nick Cave's Meltdown Festival. After the show, in a state of awe, Warren Ellis crept onto the stage, took Simone's piece of chewed gum from the piano, wrapped it in her stage towel and put it in a Tower Records bag. The gum remained with him for twenty years: a sacred totem, his creative muse, growing in significance with every passing year. In 2019, Cave, his collaborator and friend. asked Ellis if there was anything he could contribute to display in his Stranger Than Kindness exhibition. Ellis realised the time had come to release the gum. Together they agreed it should be housed in a glass case like a holy relic. Worrying the gum, which had become for him a metaphor for creativity, would be damaged or lost, Ellis decided to first have it cast in silver and gold, sparking a chain of events that no one could have predicted, one that would take him back to his childhood and his relationship to found objects.
"A beautiful, haunting quasi-memoir about the 57-year-old's early life growing up in southeastern Australia and his years spent busking across Europe in the 1980s, as well as one particular, transcendent night that changed the course of his life." —Vanity Fair
>>The book of the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition.
>>The book of the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition.
From the QUICK low-effort weekday dinner when you don’t want to spend the whole day in the kitchen but still want to eat something delicious, to the SLOW moments when cooking becomes the best part of the day, these recipes will teach you how to cook great tasting, modern vegetarian food and show you how to find joy in the process.
SNOWBALL POETRY COMPETITION. Celebrate 25 years of Aotearoa’s National Poetry Day! Write a 25-line poem. The first line must consist of one letter; the second must consist of two letters; 
the third, three; and so on, adding a letter to the line length every line for 25 lines. Send the poem to us by 19 August. The winner will be announced on 26 August 2022 (and will receive a prize).
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends by Philip Waechter {Reviewed by STELLA} In need of a sweet and cheering book? Look no further than A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends. This delightful book by Philip Waechter is a perfect antidote to our grey skies and rainy days. Raccoon is bored — an exciting book isn’t doing the trick nor some jumping exercises (even though he looks very flexible). And then he has an idea — he’ll bake an apple cake — perfect. But he has no eggs! A quick visit to Fox is on the cards. Fox has hens, so Fox will have eggs. But Fox is busy trying to fix a leak and can’t reach high enough. A ladder is needed! Raccoon knows who will have one. Badger has everything! (When you get to Badger’s house have a look around his sitting room — what a lot of enticing things). Badger is busy with a crossword puzzle and they need someone brainy help. Who to turn to? Bear, of course. Off they go, Raccoon, Fox and Badger, walking together, enjoying the sunny day and the blackberries en route. When they get to the woods, Bear isn’t home, but Crow knows where she is. To the river they all go, to find Bear waiting for the fish to bite. Yet patience isn’t high on the agenda, and it’s hot. Fox thinks she can catch a fish — alas no, but a swim with friends is even better. Suffice to say the puzzle gets solved, the ladder retrieved, the eggs taken home and the cake is baked. Enough for all! I love this semi-circular domino-style storytelling — where one action leads to another and builds a community of characters and interactions. This is doubly good in A Perfect Wonderful Day with Friends because the outcomes are always positive — the solutions to problems are simply resolved through cooperation and goodwill. Charmingly written, this is a good read-aloud with its repetitive structure and snippets of humour and the right amount of text to keep young ones engaged. The beautiful illustrations make it a joy to look at and the more looking you do, the more you will see. In the best tradition of picture books, the pictures and words complement each other perfectly. Waechter’s drawings are delicate and precise (he’s a fan of Jean-Jacques Sempé), capturing the scenes with quiet detail while simultaneously evoking the individuality of his characters with wit and emotive quirks. It’s an evocative style that enriches the story, capturing the wonderfulness of this perfect day with friends. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | |
 | The Iliac Crest by Cristina Rivera Garza (translated by Sarah Booker) {Reviewed by THOMAS} “Disappearance is contagious. Everyone knows this.” What is known, what is written, what is uttered, what is achieved immediately begins to be eroded through that onslaught of words, thoughts and experiences that constitutes what we think of as the passage of time. To hold on to one’s identity is, in such circumstances, a neurotic tendency, the invocation of a threat. “We are always prepared for the appearance of fear. We lie in wait for it. We invoke it and reject it with equal stubbornness.” The narrator in The Iliac Crest is a doctor in a hospital, situated on the border of land and sea as it is on the border of life and death, which expedites the deaths of incurables, completing, as thoroughly as possible, their disappearances as individuals. Disappearance is here both a medical and a political condition. After working at the hospital for 25 years, the doctor’s home is effectively colonised, almost simultaneously, by an ex-lover, who immediately falls ill and becomes effectively inaccessible to the doctor for the rest of the novel, and by a woman claiming to be the (actual) Mexican author Amparo Dávila, who is writing 'the story of her disappearance' in a notebook. From the evening of their intrusion upon his previous routine, from the intrusion upon his habitual life of both memory and imagination, the doctor’s world begins to become destabilised, ultimately threatening his identity and sanity. Language is the way in which borders and distinctions are maintained, but language is also the way in which borders may be destabilised and subverted. The book displays constant tension between language and bodies, between the conceptual and the physical, between construction and erosion. There is an emphasis on borders and distinctions, especially spurious borders and distinctions, and on the subversion of these borders and distinctions. On a conceptual field there is more distance within a category than between one category and another, but the distance within categories is invisible to those intent upon borders between them. But all borders are arbitrary and therefore spurious: male/female, reality/fiction, desire/fear, fascination/repulsion, eros/abjection - these pairings are not dichotomies but overlays, more similar than they are different. Maintaining these distinctions is a compulsive act that reveals the neurotic bases of language. Rivera Garza has a lot of fun undermining distinctions, dragging the contents of her novel over them in one direction or another, or, especially, leaving them suspended on the polyvalent point of maximum ambiguity, “this threshold where one state ended and the next is unable to begin.” The characters show themselves to be, and discover themselves to be, copies, false copies, copies separated from their originals by time or by the meanings attributed to them by others. Amparo Dávila, transgressing the border between fiction and actuality, is forced to defend her authenticity and authorship when made aware of another, older, ‘truer’ Amparo Dávila (who eventually reveals herself to be dead, to be Disappearance itself). The narrator is told by the women who are staying in his house that they know his secret: that he too is a woman. He strenuously denies this but is compelled to keep checking his genitals to reassure himself, increasingly unconvincingly he tries and fails to defend his masculinity, and eventually ceases to deny her femaleness. The narrator is pushed by the events of the novel into an ambiguous zone in which distinctions do not apply, a zone which is both hazardous and liberating. “We lived on terrain that bore only a very remote resemblance to life. Our irreality and our lack of evidence not only constituted a prison but also a radical form of freedom.” |
NEW RELEASES
Eddy Smallbone (orphan) is grappling with identity, love, loss, and religion. It's two years since he blew up his school life and the earthquakes felled his city. Home life is maddening. His pet-minding job is expanding in peculiar directions. And now the past and the future have come calling — in unexpected form. As Eddy navigates his way through the Christchurch suburbs to Christmas, juggling competing responsibilities and an increasingly noisy interior world, he moves closer and closer to an overdue personal reckoning. Eddy, Eddy is a richly layered novel, deftly written with humour and pathos: a love story, peopled with flawed and comical characters, both human and animal; and a story of grief, the way its punch may leave you floundering — and how others can help you find your way back. Loosely mirroring A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Eddy, Eddy revels in language's stretch and play, the importance of story and songs, and the giddy road to adulthood.
"Intense, funny, shocking and exuberant, Eddy, Eddy is a brilliant, rich and effervescent novel about the myriad ways — sometimes right and sometimes dazzlingly wrong — that we find to save ourselves, when, like Eddy, the plates shift underneath our feet and the chasm opens." —Ursula Dubosarsky
"Intense, funny, shocking and exuberant, Eddy, Eddy is a brilliant, rich and effervescent novel about the myriad ways — sometimes right and sometimes dazzlingly wrong — that we find to save ourselves, when, like Eddy, the plates shift underneath our feet and the chasm opens." —Ursula Dubosarsky
Meet Vanessa Salomon, a privileged and misanthropic French-American translator hailing from a wealthy Parisian family. Her twin sister is a famous movie star, which Vanessa resents deeply and daily. The only man Vanessa ever loved recently killed himself by jumping off the roof of her building. It's a full life. Vanessa has just started working on an English translation of a titillating, experimental thriller by a dead author when she's offered a more prominent gig: translating the latest book by an Extremely Famous French Writer who is not in any way based on Michel Houellebecq. As soon as she agrees to meet this writer, however, her other, more obscure project begins to fight back, leading Vanessa down into a literary hell of traps and con games and sadism and doppelgangers and mystic visions and strange assignations and, finally, the secret of life itself. Peppered with 'sponsored content' providing cocktail recipes utilizing a brand of liquor imported by the film director Steven Soderbergh, and with a cameo from the actress Juno Temple, Bad Eminence is at once an old-school literary satire in the mode of Vladimir Nabokov as well as a jolly thumb in the eyes of contemporary screen-life and digital celebrity.
"I take exception to the characterization of my hair as "difficult", as my hair is in fact perfect, which I can prove in a court of law. Everything else James wrote is exactly as it happened, to the best of my memory." —Juno Temple, prodigiously talented actress with perfect hair
"This is a work of lacerating style that shook my faith in the tangible world. It preys upon the real in capricious ways, like so much of the best fiction, toying with the reader's memories until we're not sure what we see, or what we have seen. James Greer is a circus-master of great humour, malevolence and allusion, a fabricator of eerie truths. It's terrifying to enter his world." —Michael Lesslie
"James Greer is the Daphne de Maurier of psychological French literary translation thrillers that don't in any legally actionable way involve Michel Houellebecq. Bad Eminence is a funny, witty walk into a world where words, memories, people, life, death, and truth have more than one meaning." —Ben Schwartz
>>Read an extract.
>>Not not Michel Houellebecq.
>>Read an extract.
>>Not not Michel Houellebecq.
In these disarming true stories, Kate Camp moves back and forth through the smoke-filled rooms of her life: from a nostalgic childhood of the Seventies and Eighties, through the boozy pothead years of the Nineties, and into the sobering reality of a world in which Hillary Clinton did not win. "Never apologise, never explain," Kate’s mother used to say, and whether visiting her boyfriend in prison, canvassing door-to-door for Greenpeace, in a corporate toilet with sodden underwear, or facing the doctor at an IVF clinic, she doesn’t. The result is a memoir brimming with hard-won wisdom and generous humour; a story that, above all, rings true.
"I didn’t want it to end. Kate is clever, observant, funny, moving yet never sentimental, wise, and as brave as they come. She takes risks. Combine these attributes with her exceptional ability to craft the perfect phrase, sentence, paragraph, story—and there you have it: a deeply rewarding read." —Linda Burgess
"Kate Camp trains her poet’s eye on topics as diverse as bad relationships, smoking, misheard songs, the fallibility of memory, and the wrong turns we take—all with a deliciously close focus that draws us right in. Her essays shine with wit, intelligence, and a humanity that is both intimate and universal. An unmissable read." —Catherine Chidgey
After co-authoring the hugely loved cookbook Flavour with Otam Ottolenghi, Belfrage returns with a collection of her own stimulating recipes which are a fusion of Mexican, Brazilian and Italian cuisines, each with her own signature sensibilities and inventive combinations of ingredients and flavours. Mouthwatering, foolproof, surprising.
"I've been a mega fan of Ixta for years. The way she expresses life and color and soul into every dish is dang inspirational. And now you can have this feeling all to yourself, in book form! I keep mine on my bedside table and read it before I sleep and the first thing when I rise in the morning. Gives me that pep in my step just like her beautiful bold cooking!" —Eric Wareheim
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Narrated in a series of brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Kristóf’s memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years as a refugee working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook.
"One of the last books she wrote, slim and clean, but containing the accumulations of a lifetime." –John Self, Independent on Sunday
"Her descriptions – of those with whom she escaped and whose sense of isolation eventually leads them back to Hungary even at the cost of their lives, as well as those whose sense of despair brings them to suicide – offer an uncomfortable insight into the extreme vulnerability of those obliged to seek asylum abroad." –Eimear McBride, Times Literary Supplement
"This story of exile and loss, of how, for the refugee, the country in which she eventually settles, however kind and well-meaning its inhabitants, will always be a poor and inadequate substitute for the country of one’s birth, its language always an alien thing, however proficient she becomes in it – this is the story of so many people today that it is perhaps the story of our time, and Ágota Kristóf should perhaps be seen as our transnational bard." –Gabriel Josipovici
Since the early 1960s, outspoken Wellington GP Carol Shand has spent her life fighting for change in medical, social and legal issues that she considered important: maternity care, access to contraception, abortion law change, and improved response to sexual assault complaints. Carol is the daughter of Claudia and Tom Shand - a rural GP and a politician respectively. She was born at the outbreak of the Second World War and lived through post-war hardships, and then the peace and prosperity of the latter 20th century and into the 21st. Shand worked in general medical practice in Wellington for 56 years, 34 with her husband Dr Erich Geiringer. She retired in 2017, and still lives in her quarter-acre paradise in Karori, Wellington, surrounded by family, and spending time gardening, playing chamber music, and keeping a small finger in many pies. "Carol emerges with her own strong personality, and, contributing to the richness of her life, describes her love of travel and music, and the family's infectious enthusiasm for outdoor theatre." —Dame Margaret Sparrow
Learn to cook authentic Japanese food from scratch at home, with step by step recipes for the traditional classics like ramen noodles, broth, sushi rice or homemade tofu as well as recipes for more contemporary fusion dishes. Maori Murota takes you to the heart of today's Japanese family home cooking, sharing the recipes she learned while she watched her own mother and grandmother cook. Here are 100 recipes - eggplant spaghetti, pepper and miso sauce, donburi, baked sweet potato, soba salad, roast chicken with lemongrass, onigiri, hot dog, Japanese curry, steamed nut cake - many of which are vegan friendly and plant-based, to take you to the heart of Japanese home cooking. From the author of Tokyo Cult Recipes. Recommended!
In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and complicated family: her elusive, handsome father — a Jew who perished in the Holocaust; her severe, cultured mother — an Italian Lutheran who translated Russian literature; and her sister and Latvian grandparents. Jarre narrates her passage from childhood to adolescence, first as a linguistic minority in a Baltic nation and then in traumatic exile to Italy after her parents' divorce, where she lives with her maternal grandparents among a community of French-speaking Waldensian Protestants and discovers that fascist Italy is a problematic home for a Riga-born Jew. First published in Italy in1987 and now translated into English for the first time, this powerful and incisive memoir is steeped in the history of twentieth-century Europe, and probes questions of time, language, womanhood, belonging and estrangement, while asking what homeland can be for those who have none, or many more than one.
"This is a beautifully ingenious memoir, saturated in the history of the European 20th century, and made all the more compelling by Ann Goldstein's luminous translation." —Vivian Gornick
The Old Man and the Sea in te reo Māori.
Herne the hunter, mischief-maker, spirit of the forest, leader of the wild hunt, hurtles through the centuries pursued by his creator. A shapeshifter, Herne dons many guises as he slips and ripples through time - at candlelit Twelfth Night revels, at the spectacular burning of the Crystal Palace, at an acid-laced Sixties party. Wherever he goes, transgression, debauch and enchantment always follow in his wake. But as the forest is increasingly encroached upon by urban sprawl and gentrification, and the world slides into crisis, Herne must find a way to survive - or exact his revenge.
"A dark-dazzling archive of enchantments, pursuit, and desire." —Eley Williams
"This is the most adventurous, stylistically magnificent thing I've read for years. Nobody does fantasy like Zoe Gilbert." —Natasha Pulley
The Night Ship by Jess Kidd $37
1629: Embarking on a journey in search of her father, a young girl called Mayken boards the Batavia, the most impressive sea vessel of the age. During the long voyage, this curious and resourceful child must find her place in the ship's busy world, and she soon uncovers shadowy secrets above and below deck. As tensions spiral, the fate of the ship and all on board becomes increasingly uncertain. 1989: Gil, a boy mourning the death of his mother, is placed in the care of his irritable and reclusive grandfather. Their home is a shack on a tiny fishing island off the Australian coast, notable only for its reefs and wrecked boats. This is no place for a teenager struggling with a dark past and Gil's actions soon get him noticed by the wrong people. The Night Ship is a tale of human cruelty, fate and friendship, of two children, hundreds of years apart, whose fates are inextricably bound together.
Thief, Convict, Pirate, Wife: The many histories of Charlotte Badger by Jessica Ashton $35
No Other Pace To Stand: An anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri $30
Friends Like These by Meg Rosoff $19
Ulysses Unbound: A reader's companion to James Joyce's Ulysses by Terence Killeen $26
The Fabric of Civilisation: How textiles made the world by Virginia Postrel $28
How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi $45
Life in the Shallows: The wetlands of Aotearoa New Zealand by Karen Denyer and Monica Peters $65
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka $35
Hotel Magnifique by Emily J. Taylor $23
"Kidd's imagination is a thing of wonder." —New York Times
"Kidd's writing is never less than surprising and original." —Irish Independent
"Kidd has imagination to die for." —Guardian
“Lyrical, haunting, a beautiful and elegant fictional interpretation of history, I loved it." —Kate Mosse
Charlotte Badger is a woman around whom many stories have been woven: the thief sentenced to death in England and then transported to New South Wales; the pirate who joined a mutiny to take a ship to the Bay of Islands; the first white woman resident in Aotearoa; the wife of a rangatira, and many more. In this remarkable piece of historical detective work, Jennifer Ashton shows what we know about Charlotte Badger, and how the stories about her have shifted over time.
Ninety-one writers with connections to these islands grapple with the biggest issue facing people and the planet. What, then, for the work of poetry? It's at the very periphery of popular speech, niche even among the arts, yet it's also rooted in the most ancient traditions of oral storytelling, no matter where your ancestors originate from. A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment, but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds. Whether the poems you read here are cloaked in ironic apathy or bare their hearts in rousing calls to action, they all arise from a deep sense of care for this living world and the people in it.
New York City. June, 1982. When eighteen-year-old Beth arrives in Manhattan for a prestigious journalism internship, everything feels brand new and not always in a good way. A cockroach-infested sublet and a disaffected roommate are the least of her worries, and she soon finds herself caught up with her fellow interns preppy Oliver, ruthless Dan and ridiculously cool, beautiful, wild Edie. Soon, Beth and Edie are best friends the sort of heady, all-consuming best-friendship that's impossible to resist. But with the mercury rising and deceit mounting up, betrayal lies just around the corner. Who needs enemies — when you have friends like these? A gritty, intoxicating novel about a summer of unforgettable firsts — of independence, lies, love and the inevitable loss of innocence — from the author of (most recently) The Great Godden.
"Killeen's impulse is to create a commentary on Ulysses that opens the book for anyone to read. He writes clearly; his companion to Ulysses makes the book easier to follow without simplifying anything. His book is not his own insistent interpretation of Ulysses; rather, it is a guide for others that is systematic and supremely helpful. Each reader will have different moments when Ulysses Unbound becomes essential, when it comes to our aid most practically and succinctly." —Colm Tóibín
From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo's David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code. Now in paperback,
How do we talk to our children about racism? How do we teach children to be antiracist? How are kids at different ages experiencing race? How are racist structures impacting children? How can we inspire our children to avoid our mistakes, to be better, to make the world better? These are the questions Ibram X. Kendi found himself avoiding as he anticipated the birth of his first child. Like most parents or parents-to-be, he felt the reflex to not talk to his child about racism, which he feared would stain her innocence and steal away her joy. But research into the scientific literature, his experiences as a father and reflections on his own difficult experiences as a student ultimately changed his mind. In the accessible mode of his How To Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines a century of scientific research with a vulnerable and compelling personal narrative to argue that it is only by teaching our children about the reality of racism and the myth of race from the earliest age that we can actually protect them and preserve their innocence and joy.
Rich and diverse but often unloved, Aotearoa's wetlands are the most vulnerable of our ecosystems. Only a tiny fraction of their original extent remains, and we continue to lose this vital habitat. The race is on to discover more about them while we still can. This highly illustrated and absorbing book introduces and explores the wetlands of Aotearoa through the work and experiences of our leading researchers. It also explores the deep cultural and spiritual significance they have for Maori, and the collaboration of matauranga Maori and western science in continuing to improve our understanding of these special places. Featuring wetlands to visit all around the country, descriptions of the rich bird, insect and plant life that can be found there, and some of the innovative ways we can protect and restore them, Life in the Shallows is a key resource for those who want to explore, understand and care for these precious places.
Lost Possessions by Keri Hulme $25
We Want Our Books by Jake Alexander $18
The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak $53
First published in 1983, shortly before Hulme was awarded the Booker Prize for The Bone People, this novella is marked with her characteristic poetic sensibility, mix of registers, and fluid form.
When Rosa finds out that the local authorities are going to close her public library, she and her sister help to bring the community together and take action to retain this vital social institution.
The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for having it. Brunhild was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet—in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport—these two iron-willed strategists reigned over vast realms, changing the face of Europe. The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a decades-long civil war—against each other. They battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne's empire. Yet after the queens' deaths-one gentle, the other horrific—their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend.
Rogues: True stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe $40
"Shelley Puhak presents a believable and vividly drawn portrait of the Frankish world, and in doing so restores two half-forgotten and much-mythologized queens, Brunhild and Fredegund, to their proper place in medieval history." —Dan Jones
The author of the sensational Empire of Pain brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from the New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface: "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial." Keefe explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black-market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death-penalty attorney who represents the ‘worst of the worst’, among other bravura works of literary journalism.
Up above there are wildfires, smog alerts, epic droughts, paper jams, teachers' strikes, insurrections, revolutions, record-breaking summers of unendurable heat, but down below, at the pool, it is always a comfortable twenty-seven degrees. Alice is one of a group of obsessed recreational swimmers for whom their local swimming pool has become the centre of their lives — a place of unexpected kinship, freedom, and ritual. Until one day a crack appears beneath its surface. As cracks also begin to appear in Alice's memory, her husband and daughter are faced with the dilemma of how best to care for her. As Alice clings to the tethers of her past in a Home she feels certain is not her home, her daughter must navigate the newly fractured landscape of their relationship.
The legendary Hotel Magnifique is like no other: a magical world of golden ceilings, enchanting soirees and fountains flowing with champagne. It changes location every night, stopping in each place only once a decade. When the Magnifique comes to her hometown, seventeen-year-old Jani hatches a plan to secure jobs there for herself and her younger sister, longing to escape their dreary life. Luck is on their side, and with a stroke of luminous ink on paper the sisters are swept into a life of adventure and opulence. But Jani soon begins to notice sinister spots in the hotel's decadent facade. Who is the shadowy maitre who runs the hotel? And can the girls discover the true price paid by those who reside there — before it's too late?
| >> Read all Stella's reviews. | |
 | Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä {Reviewed by STELLA} Every summer Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä escaped to Klovharun, their island. In Notes From an Island, Jansson gathers memories, notes, snippets of writing about the place and their antics on this barren remote skerry, and Pietilä’s atmospheric illustrations contrast with the seaman Brunström’s no-nonsense diary entries. This is a lovely book, from its attractive cover which features a delightfully drawn map by Jansson’s mother, to the paper stock and layout. It’s enticing in all its tactile qualities as well as its content. Jansson had been heading to the Finnish archipelago most of her life with her family. They would year-on-year visit a small island with charming beaches and a small wood, but each year the number of guests increased as they invited more friends and family to share in this summer pleasure. In her late 40s, Tove craved an island of her own. Somewhere she and Tuulikki could be alone to focus on their creative work, away from interruption and the pressures of life back on the mainland. Klovharun was rocky and inhospitable — just right for being away from it all, and for the two women an invigorating environment with the sea in all directions. Arriving on Klovharun they pitched a tent and, shortly after, met Brunström — a taciturn seaman — who would help them build the cabin. The initial step — finding a suitable flat space. A flat space that needed to be carved out by dynamiting a massive boulder. A dynamic action for a dynamic landscape. Yet Tove and Tuulikki liked their yellow tent so much that they continued to sleep in it and reserved the cabin for work and for guests. How do you claim an island in the Finnish Gulf? You place a notice on the door of a shop at the nearest local settlement stating your intention to lease the land and hope that most people will place a tick in the Yes column rather than the No. And hence a quarter-century relationship with the island began. In Jansson’s writing you get a sense of refuge, but not idle respite. Living on the island between April and October required stamina and industry — fishing, maintenance of the cabin and boat, keeping the various machines ticking over, collecting driftwood from the sea as well as the surrounding islands and rolling rocks. These were productive times — the women would work on their respective art and writing projects, and sometimes collaborate on a project. Pietilä recorded their experiences in this natural wilderness on Super8 film which was later made into a documentary. This book provides a thoughtful exploration of their island life and their relationship with nature. Tove Jansson’s writing is both philosophical and straightforward (it is never lyrical or florid). giving the land, the sea and the weather their primacy. Pietilä's 24 illustrations — some etchings, others watercolour washes — are muted in their ochre monotones, but hold the power of the sky and water in them as though at any moment these elements might cast away the moment and shrug off these human interventions. |
| >> Read all Thomas's reviews. | ||
 | The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan {Reviewed by THOMAS}
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>>The hidden world of rockpools.
>>Of molluscs and men.